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Cats and Dogs in the Library – Non-Human, Human and Superhuman Rationality

Writing this last post about some philosophers’ treatment of animals reminded me of another philosopher’s, Alasdair MacIntyre’s, book Dependent Rational Animals.

Philosophers over the centuries have been fairly binary in distinguishing between human beings and other animals, mostly on the basis that non-human animals lack some capacity for reasoning or deliberation. They act on instincts and drives, whereas human beings act on reflection and reasoning.

Rationality (meaning the ability to reason) also tends to be connected with language skills. What is key, is the ability to formulate for oneself and express to others one’s reasons for actions, to reflect on them and critique them even before acting. The advanced language skills of human beings have helped set ourselves apart – in the minds of philosophers at least – as the species that is able to reason, against the others that are unable.

This binary view can be attacked from two sides: Firstly, an argument could be made to bring human rationality (in the sense of being able to reason and act on reasons) closer to certain animal behaviours. Secondly, it could be argued that animals actually do have some capacity for reasoning that is not qualitatively different from that of human beings.

McIntyre pursues both those lines of attack. He argues, that we would do well to see our human reasoning capability as a development that emerges from our animal nature and is continuous with animal behaviours:

“It is not only that the same kind of exercise of the same kind of perceptual powers provides, guides, and corrects beliefs in the case of dolphins – and some other species – as in the case of humans, but that our whole initial bodily comportment towards the world is originally an animal comportment and that when, through having become language users, we under the guidance of parents and others restructure that comportment, elaborate and in new ways correct our beliefs and redirect our activities, we never make ourselves independent of our animal nature and inheritance. Partly this is a matter of those aspects of our bodily condition that simply remain unchanged, of what remains constant through and after the social and cultural scheduling and ordering of our bodily functions: toilet training, developing what one’s culture regards as regular sleeping and eating habits, and learning what constitutes politeness and rudeness by way of sneezing, spitting, burping, farting, and the like. And partly it is a matter of what is involved in our becoming able to reflect upon our overall comportment and our directness towards the goods of our animal nature, and so in consequence to correct and redirect ourselves, our beliefs, feelings, attitudes and actions.”

McIntyre also discusses at some length the research showing the ability of some species, e. g. dolphins, to learn and use language to develop and communicate hunting strategies and to adjust their behaviours to a changing environment.

In some experiments, dolphins were able to learn a made up vocabulary and syntax made up by human beings using dolphin sounds and distinguish sentences like “take the surfboard to the frisbee” from “take the frisbee to the surfboard.” (Dolphin researchers seem to live a fun life full of frisbees and surfboards.)

This ultimately leads MacIntyre to the suggestion that there is a spectrum of reasoning ability, and that some animals are further along that spectrum, closer to where human beings are, than others:

“To acknowledge that there are these animal preconditions for human rationality requires us to think of the relationship of human beings to members of other intelligent species in terms of a scale or a spectrum rather than of a single line of division between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ At one end of this scale there are types of animal for whom the sense of perception is no more than the reception of information without conceptual content. […] At another level are animals whose perceptions are in part the result of purposeful and attentive investigation and whose changing actions track in some way the true and the false. And among such animals we can distinguish between those whose perceptions and responses are more fine-grained and those whose perceptions and responses are less so.”

This leads MacIntyre to a revision of a famous moment in philosophy:

Wittgenstein remarked that ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’ (Philosophical Investigations II, xi, 223). About lions perhaps the question has to be left open. But I am strongly inclined to say of dolphins that, even although their modes of communication are so very different from ours, it is nonetheless true that if they could speak, some of the greatest of the recent interpreters of dolphin activity would be or would have been able to understand them.

The “spectrum” idea of animal rationality reminds me of one more thought. That is a text by the philosopher-psychologist-theologian William James, who is forever condemned to have the tagline “brother of the novelist Henry James” after his name. He wrote:

“I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.”

Even if the human species represents a point relatively far along a spectrum of rationality, it is still only a point on a spectrum. That leaves open the possibility that there are points on the spectrum beyond human rationality. Not everyone will find the idea palatable that there are already beings in the universe – divine or alien, presumably – who have a higher form of experience than ours, relative to whom we are like domesticated cats and dogs in drawing rooms and libraries. But whether it is already available to any creature, or not, the possibility remains there that rationality could develop further than that of human beings.

There is no reason to be so ego-centric and grandiose from the human perspective to assume that we represent not only the high-point, but the end-point of rationality. And it is intriguing to think about some of the consequences of that. Some points, briefly, that spring to mind:

It could be argued that human beings don’t even use their rationality for much of the time. We often act automatically, instinctively, reactively, habitually. That is fine and probably saves time as well as mental effort. But we need to be clear that for much of the time we don’t make use of the highest form of our rationality. If, as Viktor Frankl says, there is a space “between the stimulus and the response and in that space lies our power and our freedom” we should be aware of how often we don’t make use of that space, but act in a more animal-like stimulus-response mode.

The cats and dogs that thrash the furniture of the drawing rooms or make a mess of the libraries are not the ones that are most popular with the people who understand the features of those rooms. In the same way we should approach our environment, the universe, whose features we can’t fully comprehend, with a certain humility and a desire to leave it intact.

We should keep alive the hope that it is possible to refine our rationality to a higher point on the spectrum, not just over evolutionary history for our species, but over a lifetime. The dolphins that learned a more advanced level of vocabulary and syntax, developed their language and reasoning capabilities to a point that wasn’t necessarily available to other individuals of their species. But they were trained by human beings who were further along the spectrum of rationality. If we were to aspire to develop beyond our point, whom would we look for training? It’s a tough question. But we have concepts of perfection: Plato’s idea of the Good, the Stoic concept of the wise person, religiously inspired images of the highest attainable mode of living, the contemplation of beauty, the virtues, or even love. (“Will not ‘Act lovingly’ translate ‘Act perfectly’, whereas ‘Act rationally’ will not? It is tempting to say so” writes Iris Murdoch)